In the gaming industry, a “progressive” involves the collecting of coin-in data from participating gaming devices (e.g., slot machines), contributing a percentage of that coin-in data to a jackpot amount, and awarding that jackpot amount to a player upon a jackpot won event. A jackpot won event typically occurs when a “progressive winning position” is achieved at a participating gaming device. If the gaming device is a slot machine, a progressive winning position may, for example, correspond to alignment of progressive jackpot reel symbols along a certain pay line.
Historically, progressive gaming systems have utilized single-purpose progressive game chips, able to behave as progressive games only. A game is internally configured to behave as a progressive. Unfortunately, without separating the progressive definition from the game, the game cannot quickly and easily participate in any other progressive other than the one for which it is currently configured. Also, without the capacity to enable and disable progressive behavior in a game, stopping and starting a progressive during a jackpot session is impossible without physical intervention.
Historically, gaming applications such as progressive gaming systems which require physical objects (e.g., gaming devices, site controllers, carousel controllers, etc.) have used their own definitions of these physical objects instead of using shared definitions from a common source (e.g., central system). Unfortunately, without a common source of definitions of physical objects, maintaining multiple sources of definitions requires added administration and is prone to errors of omission and incongruity. Also, without the separate profiling of physical objects by physical attributes and application attributes, adding or removing games and gaming devices from an application, such as a progressive session, requires physical intervention to each individual device.
A need therefore exists for a gaming system that overcomes one or more of the aforementioned shortcomings.